The CEO of a startup founded by college dropouts sent a brutally honest pitch to potential investors

One of the hardest parts about getting a company off the ground
is finding the right investors to help keep the lights on
during the early days.

If you've ever watched the hit show "Shark Tank," then you'll
know it's no easy feat convincing investors to pour money
into your company — especially in its early days. As
such, young startups need to be confident, persistent and ready
for rejection when trying to pitch venture capitalists.

One startup is taking a bit of an unorthodox approach to pitching
potential investors.

Exeq, the New York-based startup
founded by four New York City college drop-outs, blasted an
email out to 400 venture capitalists and angel investors,
according to a person familiar with the matter.

In an email seen by Business Insider, Exeq CEO Derek Brown, a
former engineer at LinkedIn and Addepar, laid out the value of
the company, which seeks to change the way millennials think
about spending their money.

But before he did, he was brutally honest.

Here's Brown (emphasis ours):

"At Exeq, we don’t have everything
together. We don’t know the future for our product and
platform. We don’t know or control the external circumstances
around our company."

The point of the app is to help people make more
efficient decisions about their spending. It does so by notifying
users when slight changes to how they spend can be made. For
instance, the app might alert a person who frequents a coffee
shop on their way to work that there is a more affordable
alternative nearby. The app, which is only
available in New York City to iPhone users, has 6,000 users. But,
like most startups, their sights are set higher.

"By combining financial and lifestyle data, we’re able to build a
consumer product that enables consumer behavior…responsibly,"
Brown wrote in the email.

The company already counts Barclays, the British financial
services company, as a backer. Here's Brown on why others should
jump in:

"Because you have a fiduciary duty to your LPs to make the best
investments you can. We’d fall in that category. ;) On a
more serious note, the answer’s simple: if you don’t see the
shape of the world in the way that we’ve described above, then
you shouldn’t invest in us."